In this art tutorial you will learn how to color black and white comic book line art using Photoshop. The techniques described in this tutorial can be applied to other image editing applications such as GIMP, but for this tutorial we will focus on how it's done in Photoshop. First a short list of how to get some colors on our black and white line art:

We import/open our black and white line art in Photoshop

We apply basic flat colors

We back up our flat colors

We apply color gradients

Open or Import The Black/White Line Art

First we need to get our line art into Photoshop by either a) Scanning it in 300 DPI grayscale and importing it into Photoshop, or b) Open our line art just like any regular image file. Next we need to switch to RGB color mode. If RGB mode is already selected we simply skip this step. If not we set it to RGB mode as shown in the picture below.

Preparing For Coloring

We need to make sure that our line art is the bottom most layer before we continue. Next we create a new layer just above our line art layer, select it and click the layer drop down in the layer palette and choose "Multiply". By doing this the black line art will always be visible even when we fill our new layer with color. The picture below shows how to do this. Let's name our new layer 'Flats'.

Apply Theme Color (Optional)

We can choose to set an atmosphere for the entire page by applying an overall color like blue if for example something bone chilling is happening on our page. Or something orange or red if something 'explosive' is taking place. To do this we first select our 'Flats' layer. We then choose a color (blue for this tutorial) and press ALT + Backspace. And voila! Our page is now blue with all our line art still showing.

Moving On

Now we have something going for us so lets quickly move on to part 2 where the hard work begins.